Comment by atombender

10 years ago

Borland's IDEs (Turbo Pascal, etc.) also implemented the WordStar keyboard shortcuts and block behaviour, and it was amazingly productive.

You could mark a block (^KB to start, ^KK to end), and you could move around, find a place to insert it, then hit ^KV to move it there. Borland's IDEs also had selecting (using shift+arrows like many UIs today), and didn't affect blocks, which meant you could do some really fast editing by combining them.

The WordStar keystrokes currently survive in JOE [1], which I use as my $EDITOR. There's also a tiny Atom plugin [2] which gives you those block commands.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor

[2] https://github.com/iarna/atom-joe

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atombender

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dalke  10 years ago

The phrase I remember was that the WordStar key commands were no one's favorite commands, but everyone's second favorite. That is, everyone in microcomputing in the 1980s knew and could use the ^KB, etc. set, but preferred some other editor's way of doing things.

Looking around now, this may have come from Phillipe Khan and Sidekick. Quoting Jim Mischel at http://www.mischel.com/diary/2005/08/22.htm :

> While I'm on the subject of WordStar, I've heard a story that I haven't been able to verify. When Phillipe Kahn was asked why he chose to use the WordStar command set in the first version of Sidekick, he said that he asked a lot of people for their editor preferences. Almost everybody had a different first preference (back then it could have been Emacs, vi, Word Perfect, WordStar, Brief, Leading Edge Word Processor, or who knows what else). But almost everybody he asked knew WordStar and named it as their second preference. I don't know if it's true, but it smacks of truth. Certainly every microcomputer programmer I knew back in the late 80s was proficient with WordStar.